which distro and why do you prefer it over others?

I don't use Ubuntu on my desktop but in my experience it performs on par with other distributions and it is not a RAM hog either.

I thing "bloat" is a big mythical monster people like to throw around because it's difficult to argue against and scares everybody.

I think snaps were slow to load to begin with but I also read that it was much improved recently, one can also install Flatpak.

So I think Ubuntu is a great distro, performant and stable.